Pixar and Foundry declares Collaboration around Render Man for Katana
The Pixar Animation Studios and Foundry have declared a concerted technological cooperation to bring KATANA and Render Man unitedly, making a mixed best of breed toolset for high end rendering and lighting.
March 13th, 2014
The Pixar Animation Studios and Foundry have declared a concerted technological cooperation to bring KATANA and Render Man unitedly, making a mixed best of breed toolset for high end rendering and lighting.
It’s designed to offer every user of KATANA with fast and easy access to Pixar’s Academy Award winning rendering technology utilized for the stunning visual effects seen in the majority of today's feature films.
KATANA, the first lighting tool from The Foundry, and Pixar’s Render Man which has been recognized as the industry standard VFX and animation rendering, were both used together to great effect on Disney and Pixar’s acclaimed short “The Blue Umbrella,” which was played in theatres with “Monsters University.”
The plugin makes it possible to use Render Man shaders and new features of Render Man Pro Server 18 such as path tracing and geometric area lights inside Katana.
To use it, you will require running Render Man Pro Server 18 and Katana 1.5 or 1.6. Katana is available on Linux only, so there are no Windows or Mac OS X versions.
Special Effects Inventor and Engineer Petro Vlahos Dies at 96
Special effects inventor and engineer Petro Vlahos, whose industry contributions made possible such iconic film moments as Julie Andrews dancing with penguins in the 1964 classic Mary Poppins, died Sunday. He was 96.
Phenakistoscope (1831) A phenakistoscope disc by Eadweard Muybridge (1893).The phenakistoscope was an early animation device. It was invented in 1831 simultaneously by the Belgian Joseph Plateau and the Austrian Simon von Stampfer. It consists of a disk with a series of images, drawn on radii evenly spaced around the center of the disk. Slots are cut out of the disk on the same radii as the drawings, but at a different distance from the center. The device would be placed in front of a mirror and spun. As the phenakistoscope is spun, a viewer would look through the slots at the reflection of the drawings which would only become visible when a slot passes by the viewer's eye. This created the illusion of animation.
